Offering: January 12, 2025
Double vulnerability
I have openings for one-on-one tarot sessions later this month. For more on what sessions entail click here. To book an appointment, click here. For more on my background, process and work with the cards, check out this Q&A I did with Laura Newberry for The Los Angeles Times, How tarot can be used to understand ourselves.
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In his short essay “On Transience,” Sigmund Freud describes taking a beautiful countryside walk with a young poet who, despite being in an idyllic spring setting cannot enjoy it because he knows it’s all fated to die. The founder of psychoanalysis views the young poet’s inability to enjoy beauty as a revolt against mourning; a refusal to lose by refusing to love altogether.
Freud argues that there are two impulses one is likely to have upon realizing that all beauty decays: despondency, or rebellion against the decay. With the former, a person refuses to take joy in beauty on account that no beauty can last, while with the latter, one insists on the possibility that certain beautiful things—nature, artworks, loves—must be capable of escaping that force of destruction. And though Freud doesn’t arrive to this conclusion in the essay, both cases could be seen as a refusal to struggle with the difficulty of transience, and therefore a refusal to mourn.
Freud spends much of the short essay—which was written during the first year of World War I—asserting that awareness of transience should never amount to an inability to enjoy beauty. Instead, knowledge of transience could be what makes things more beautiful. He argues that “limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment,” and finds it “incomprehensible that the thought of beauty’s transience should interfere with our joy of it.”
For Freud—who wrote “Mourning and Melancholia” around that same time—mourning was a healthy activity. It was a regular reaction to the loss of a loved one, but also to the loss of “some abstraction which has taken place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on…” And while he was certain that mourning was normal, the painfulness of the process remained somewhat of a mystery.
It feels important to me that—at least since 1915—mourning has been thought about as an activity that occurs in response not only to bereavements but also losses of abstractions, including ideas about the future and world views. At that time, Freud was grappling himself with what he describes as “shattered” pride in the early days of a war that “robbed the world of its beauties.1” The war shattered not only Freud’s pride, but also his admiration for and hope in what came to feel like an illusion of progress.
The main work that Freud does in “Mourning and Melancholia” is to distinguish between the two conditions, which share features but are clearly distinct. He spends more time fleshing out melancholia than mourning, but his descriptions of mourning are useful. He describes an “exclusive devotion to mourning” which occurs for a mourner, who similarly loses both interest in the outside world and capacity to attach to a new object after a significant one has been lost.
According to Freud, what happens in mourning is that the libido has been removed from its attachment to a lost object. As mentioned, the object could be a person but could also be an abstraction—like an ideal, belief, or anticipated outcome—and in any case, the detachment “arouses understandable opposition.”
This experience of opposition can be incredibly intense. Freud argues that “people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them.” He also argues that the demand for the libido to withdraw from its attachments entails a set of orders that “cannot be obeyed at once.” Which is another way of saying that mourning is a thing that takes time.
Instead of resolving at once, these orders “are carried out bit by bit, at great expense of time” and energy. The loss of interest and withdrawal from external pursuits which occurs in mourning is, for Freud, due to the ego’s absorption in the difficult tasks of mourning. But eventually, when the work of mourning is completed, “the ego becomes free and uninhibited again.”
Freud is perplexed by the question of why mourning takes time. For him, the sorts of losses which cause both mourning and melancholia are so important that they necessitate a process that must be “long-drawn-out and gradual.” And this is because the importance of the loved object is “a significance reinforced by a thousand links.”